As regular CFZ-watchers will know, for some time Corinna has been doing a column for Animals & Men and a regular segment on On The Track... particularly about out-of-place birds and rare vagrants. There seem to be more and more bird stories from all over the world hitting the news these days so, to make room for them all - and to give them all equal and worthy coverage - she has set up this new blog to cover all things feathery and Fortean.

Friday, 30 November 2012

One of the country’s leading conservation groups
wants Congress to ban imports of reticulated pythons, green anacondas, boa
constrictors, and two other constrictor snakes that pose a major threat to
native wildlife. In a letter sent the U.S. House Resource Committee, American
Bird Conservancy says these snakes should be added to the list of “injurious wildlife”
regulated by the Lacey Act, one of America’s oldest conservation statutes
designed to protect wildlife from illegal trade. The change would make
importing or transporting these snakes over state lines a federal offence.

“This bill (H.R. 511 –To Prohibit the
Importation of Various Injurious Species of Constrictor Snakes) is necessary to
prevent the further spread of these aggressive, invasive predators,” said Darin
Schroeder, Vice President for Conservation Advocacy at ABC. “It’s
well-established that these snakes are highly adaptable to new environments,
and that they consume a wide variety of prey, including mammal, amphibian,
lizard, and threatened and endangered bird species.”

A Washington man will spend six months in prison for killing his girlfriend's
pet parrot.

A Washington man will spend six months in prison
for stabbing his girlfriend’s parrot to death with a fork, a court ruled.

In a sentencing hearing on Tuesday, a defense
lawyer said that Richard J. Atkinson, 63, of Everett, north of Seattle, was
blacked out drunk and didn’t remember attacking the bird at the couple’s home
in August, the Herald Newspaper reported.

Atkinson mixed whiskey with anti-anxiety
medication before stabbing the bird with a serving fork and then trashing his
gal’s belongings, his lawyer said.

Superior Court Judge George Appel slammed
Atkinson as “depraved” and “barbaric,” and ordered him to undergo psychiatric
treatment as well as pay for his girlfriend’s trashed belongings, thenewspaper
reported.

The bird killer is also barred from coming in
contact with any pets for five years.

ScienceDaily (Nov. 27, 2012) — Every kid
knows that giant carnivores like Tyrannosaurus rexdominated the Cretaceous
period, but they weren't the only big guys in town. Giant plant-eating
theropods -- close relatives of both T. rex and today's birds -- also lived and
thrived alongside their meat-eating cousins. Now researchers have started looking
at why dinosaurs that abandoned meat in favor of vegetarian diets got so big,
and their results may call conventional wisdom about plant-eaters and body size
into question.

Scientists have theorized that bigger was better
when it came to plant eaters, because larger digestive tracts would allow
dinosaurs to maximize the nutrition they could extract from high-fiber,
low-calorie food. Therefore, natural selection may have favored increasing body
sizes in groups of animals that went meatless.

Three groups of giant feathered theropods from
the Cretaceous period seemed to follow that rule of thumb -- the biggest
specimens were also the plant-eaters. Lindsay Zanno, research assistant
professor of biology at North Carolina State University and director of the
Paleontology & Geology Research Lab at the North Carolina Museum of Natural
Sciences, and Peter Makovicky, associate curator of paleontology at the Field
Museum in Chicago, decided to see if diet was the determining factor when it
came to size. Makovicky notes that "Having three closely related lineages
of dinosaurs adapting to herbivory over the same geological time span and
showing evidence of increasing size provided a near perfect test case."

November 2012. Illegal shooting, trapping, nest
destruction and poisoning continue to pose a significant threat to Scotland's
birds of prey, according to the latest annual report by RSPB Scotland, covering
2011.

The Illegal Killing of Birds of Prey in Scotland
in 2011
The report, The Illegal Killing of Birds of Prey in Scotland in 2011, revealed
that, as in previous years, some of the country's rarest bird of prey species
continue to be the victims of wildlife crimes such as the illegal use of crow
traps and the setting out of baits in the open, laced with illegal and highly
toxic chemicals.

Reduced - But still an issue
Whilst the report acknowledged a decline in the number of detected poisoning
incidents in comparison to the previous few years, in 2011 a total of 20 birds,
including 4 red kites and a golden eagle were amongst those confirmed by
Scottish Government testing to have been poisoned.

Other incidents recorded by RSPB Scotland during
the year included a buzzard starved to death in a crow trap, a short-eared owl,
a Golden
eagle shot, a Golden eagle
trapped, two peregrines and three buzzards shot and a goshawk nest
destroyed.

Hen harriers and Golden eagles ‘disappearing'
The report also highlights the suspicious disappearances of nesting hen
harriers and peregrines, and of golden eagles fitted with satellite
transmitters by scientists studying their movements and survival.

As in recent years, the majority of incidents of
illegal killing took place in areas managed for driven grouse shooting,
particularly in the eastern and central Highlands and the southern Uplands of
Scotland.

Ian Thomson, RSPB Scotland's Head of
Investigations said "Many of these crimes were discovered purely by
chance, by walkers or birdwatchers, in remote areas of countryside, it's safe
to assume that many victims of illegal killing are not detected or reported.

November 2012. Light pollution is often associated with negative effects on
wildlife. Now, ecologists have found that by mimicking a perpetual full moon,
the gas flares and electrical lighting along Scotland's Forth estuary are
helping shorebirds stock up on more food during the winter to fuel their spring
migration. The research is the first to use night-time light data from US
military satellites to study animal behaviour.

Coasts and estuaries are most heavily developed
Coasts and estuaries are among the most rapidly developing areas on Earth.
Night-time satellite images of the planet show that except Antarctica,
continents are ringed with halos of brightly-lit human development. But coasts
are also key wildlife sites. Every year, millions of waterbirds arrive from the
Arctic to overwinter on UK coasts, yet scientists remain largely in the dark
about how these birds respond to the bright lights of coastal cities and
industry.

To shed light on the issue, Dr Ross Dwyer and colleagues
from the University of Exeter investigated how artificial light affected
feeding habits of the common redshank in the Forth estuary, one of Scotland's
most industrialised coasts. As well as major industry such as Grangemouth oil
refinery and Longannet power station, whose lights and gas flares illuminate
the intertidal areas at night, the estuary's pristine salt marsh and mudflats
are home to hundreds of thousands of migrating birds each winter.

This winter, they’re the only thing to be seen in. Giorgio Armani and Ralph Lauren are selling designer versions, they’ve featured in glossy fashion magazines and they’re flying off the shelves in stores like Benetton, Marks & Spencer and Gap.

The down jacket is currently experiencing astonishing popularity — but before you rush out and buy one, ask yourself this: how cruel is the coat?

For the Mail can reveal the dark side of the down industry, where hordes of birds — particularly geese — suffer horrifically to provide the filling for the latest fashion statement.

Feathers are ripped from the bodies of live creatures, leaving them bleeding and in pain. Others are a by-product of the foie gras industry — so cruel it’s been banned in Britain.

The most prized down, and therefore the one that pays the pluckers the most, is hand-stripped from live birds.

That’s because the process of mechanically taking it from carcasses before washing and drying it can affect the quality.

High-grade down from live geese — using the softest feathers from the breast region, as opposed to the longer ones from the back, under the wings and the neck — can fetch as much as £22 per kilo.

The going rate for those from slaughtered creatures is just £1.60. But the price paid by the bird is far greater.

The living hell of their short lives has been repeatedly witnessed by Marcus Mueller, 34 — an investigator for the animal charity Four Paws — who has been working for many years to expose the industry’s cruelty.

He has seen first-hand the brutality of the Hungarian plucking brigades — men and women who go from farm to farm stripping live birds of their plumage.

Thursday, 29 November 2012

Waxwing year gets underway with large flocks on Skye and in Yorkshire and Humberside

November 2012.

Britain has seen a large influx of several thousand waxwings
this autumn. With distinctive bright red tips at the end of their dusky pink
plumage, square-ended yellow tail feathers and a black ‘highwayman' band
running across their eyes, these colourful little birds have big characters. A
flock of 1,000 was seen round the Isle of Skye, and several flocks of up to 300
birds have been present in Yorkshire and the Humber region as the birds move
south after having depleted berry crops further north.

Rowan tree
Natural England staff and volunteers from the Lower Derwent
Valley National Nature Reserve (NNR) came to nearby York to ring
waxwings around the York Walls. With permission from the City of York Council,
nets were set round a rowan tree beneath the city walls and 12 waxwings were
soon caught. This was a great result in terms of successfully ringing birds to
gather scientific evidence; and a fantastic opportunity to tell the watching
public more about waxwings and how bird ringing projects work.

Craig Ralston, Natural England's Senior Reserve
Manager from the Lower Derwent Valley NNR, waxed lyrical about the ringing
project. He said: "This ringing project - which forms part of a wider
scientific data collection programme - brings fascinating conservation work
more often found on our nature reserves, right into the heart of the city. It's
a great way of engaging with people about the surprising natural wonders that
can be found on our doorsteps."

Back in my landlubber days Christmas Bird Counts
(CBCs) were always a highlight of the winter holiday season. We would suit up
for the weather and spend the day counting birds within our ‘count circle’. At
the end of the day we would meet up with the other birders and tally our
observations. The Christmas Bird Count is managed by the National Audubon
Society in the United States and this year will be the 112th count. This
citizen science program provides avian scientists with data to look for trends
in abundance and distribution of individual bird species.

Now, for the second year, cruisers and other
mariners can be part of a similar large-scale citizen science effort. This
Christmas bird count, not affiliated with Audubon, is called a SeaBC. Last
year’s inaugural count spanned one hundred degrees of latitude from Maine to
Antarctica. The second SeaBC is scheduled for November-January and this year
we’re encouraging mariners to simply take digital photos of birds seen at sea.
It’s fine if you’re not a seabird expert! Seabirds can be difficult to
identify—even for experts. Take digital photos and jot down notes, saving the
identification for later with the help of the online community at the Birding
Aboard Facebook page.

There are several good bird identification
guides for the Caribbean. Birds
of the West Indies (Princeton Field Guides), by Herbert Raffaele, James Wiley, Orlando Garrido, Allan Keith and
Janis Raffaele (2003) is a good resource for land or sea travels in the
Caribbean.

Additional resources, including instructions and
tally sheets, are posted on www.facebook.com/Birding.Aboard, under the button
for SeaBC resources. All data goes to the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology’s
eBird database, which has easy online reporting and is available in English,
French, Spanish and Portuguese (www.ebird.org). The data becomes a resource for
scientists and citizens worldwide and is shared with other conservation
organizations such as BirdLife International and National Audubon Society.

Is the Scottish Government being deliberately
misleading when it says Scotland's new Marine Protected Areas (MPAs), to be
announced next month, will save seabirds?

We hope not but, RSPB Scotland and our
supporters are expecting the list of MPAs to offer little for seabirds, given
that, as a group of species, they have been marginalised in site selection. We
hope this will be corrected.

New MPAs protecting sandeels from industrial
fishing are welcome. An area from north-east Scotland to Northumberland has
been closed since 2000. This closure and restrictions to local sandeel
fisheries are championed by RSPB but these measures cannot prevent other
development pressures on sandeel grounds. We look forward to the Firth of Forth
appearing at the top of the list of MPAs to protect sandeels as this is one of
the most important breeding areas in the North Sea and vital for seabird
colonies.

Scientists are concerned about the decline in
seabirds and our research shows how this could have devastating impacts on the
economies of rural areas which rely on wildlife tourism. Protecting seabirds
and supporting communities requires MPAs designated for seabirds.

Many garden birds need feeding, especially after
such bad weather. Even magpies.

BSA issues plea for kind people everywhere to
help garden birds through the winter

November 2012. The Birdcare Standards
Association - the only UK organisation to provide standards for the quality of
birdfeed and accessories sold in the UK - has issued a plea to garden bird
lovers across the country to feed the birds this winter - starting now.

Atrocious wet weather
Most garden birds supplement the majority of their naturally occurring feed
stuffs with the seed mixes and fatballs and other products put out in gardens
by kind homeowners across the UK - but this year they will be even more reliant
on the scraps and the quality birdfeed put out for them due to the atrocious
and wet weather we've experienced this year.

"The very wet weather particularly in the
spring has caused major problems for many garden birds naturally occurring food
and many bushes that carry berries that birds eat in the very cold weather have
already been stripped before the end of November, highlighting the difficult
situation they will experience when the really cold weather comes along,"
says Birdcare Standards Association CEO Steve Paddock. "Sadly we lose a
lot of garden birds during the winter anyway and if we are not to see that
number getting even higher over the next few weeks, we need to offer them help
in the form of some good quality, nutritious feed products that they can get
hold of easily in our gardens. We recommend using products that carry the BSA
logo because they meet our standards for quality and we know that the birds
will benefit from the feed they eat."

A gang of cantankerous flying aliens known to
some avian aficionados as "devil birds" have been spotted flitting
around San Francisco's Lake Merced acting like they belong.

The crow-sized creatures, which ornithologists
know as great-tailed grackles, are native to Latin America and the southern
United States, but the aggressive birds have recently been moving west,
gobbling up the eggs of other birds and threatening to make a nuisance
of themselves.

As many as six males and two females have been
seen at Lake Merced, the largest concentration of the species ever recorded in
San Francisco, according to the experts.

"They are often vilified as devil
birds," said David
Cruz, a local photographer and founder of Natures Lantern, a local nature
photo and video sharing site. "It is a unique bird that many San Francisco
residents have yet to see."

The birds, known scientifically as Quiscalus
mexicanus, have in recent decades expanded their range from Texas and parts
south of there to Northern California, most likely because of human-caused
changes in their habitat. The first sighting in California was along the
Colorado River in 1964. The birds have since colonized much of urban Southern
California and parts of the San Joaquin Valley.

The months have not been kind to Cat Island, two
small spits of land in Plaquemines Parish that have served for years as bird
nesting destinations.

Cat Island is the name for two separate islands
that have been eroding for years. In the past four months, the two islands have
gotten smaller with much of their vegetation dying or dead.

Cat Island west was 360 acres in 1930, 40 acres
in 1998 and 4 acres in 2010 before the Deepwater Horizon/BP explosion and
subsequent heavy oiling.

Although in July the island could boast areas of
thick black mangroves that were being used by brown pelicans, by Nov. 16, the
mangroves were dead and the island had been split into two pieces.

Cat Island east was about 5 acres before the
leak in 2010. In July, it was just a sand spit with some vegetation that may be
100 yards long and 30 yards wide. By November, it also was smaller and without
vegetation.

However, there is an effort under way to restore
the islands — if the money to do the work can be found. Plans for restoring the
islands include breakwaters made of a structure that will have holes in it to
allow water flow, a fish habitat and to serve as oyster foundations.

Wednesday, 28 November 2012

Scientists are trying to understand why
capercaillie are thriving on a few estates, but not across most of their
distribution.

Local capercaillie success encourages ‘Friends'
to find out more

November 2012. A group of capercaillie experts
and enthusiasts have been visiting two Highland estates to find out why numbers
of the rare species are increasing in the face of serious declines in other
parts of Scotland.

The Friends of Capercaillie were invited to
visit the Forestry Commission Scotland owned Inshriach Forest and the privately
owned Glenfeshie Estate. Across Scotland - the only place in Britain where
capercaillies are found - there are thought to be fewer than 1,300 of these
magnificent turkey sized birds remaining. Nationally they appear to be
declining still further in their former strongholds like Deeside, but the
Speyside population is holding up well and even increasing on some sites, in
spite of ‘challenging' summer weather which affects productivity.

Lekkers
From only 9 lekking cocks counted in 2006, lek counts this year reported 33
cocks across Inshriach and at Glenmore, the Commission's other forest in the
area.

Graeme Prest, who manages Forestry Commission
Scotland's Inverness, Ross & Skye District, said: "Numbers in
Inshriach have increased - and the increase is impressive considering the big
declines over much of the rest of the range. Something appears to being working
well here for Capercaillie - and we were keen to show the ‘Friends' what we
have been doing and the impact it appears to be having. Much of that success
seems to come down to the fact that we are learning how to manage our
multi-purpose forests Scots pine forests in ways that allow us to strike a
balance between the needs of capercaillie and the demands of timber production
and recreation.

ScienceDaily (Nov. 26, 2012) — Despite --
or perhaps because of -- their large size, swans seem particularly prone to
injury. Known problems include collisions with cars, lead poisoning due to
gunshot wounds or ingested foreign bodies and injuries from fishing hooks.
Injuries to the birds' hips, however, are believed to be uncommon. Michaela
Gumpenberger and Alexandra Scope of the University of Veterinary Medicine,
Vienna now present evidence to suggest that such injuries are more frequent
than suspected but are under-recorded because of difficulties in diagnosis.
They show that computerized tomography is far better suited to examine the hip
joint than classical radiographic methods.

Their results are published in the journal Avian
Pathology.

Diagnosing an injury in a swan is a far from
easy undertaking. Not only are swans large, frequently weighing over 10 kg, but
they are generally not happy at being handled and thus many of them can only be
examined after sedation, which naturally represents a risk. The hip joints of
many species of bird are known to be vulnerable to injury but swans are believed
to suffer broken hips only rarely. The traditional way of examining the birds'
hips relies on radiography but Gumpenberger and Scope now show that
computerized tomography (CT) gives more reliable findings.

ALAMOSA — Federal wildlife officials and local
water and government officials finalized a plan Wednesday to protect a pair of
rare birds, while allowing local farmers and ranchers to avoid more stringent
provisions in the Endangered Species Act.

The San Luis Valley Regional Habitat
Conservation Plan protects the southwestern willow flycatcher, which is listed
as endangered by the federal government, and the yellow-billed cuckoo, a candidate
for federal listing.

"We're happy to see our conservation
partners in the San Luis Valley develop this plan that will allow people to
sustain their rich tradition of working the fertile landscape of the valley
while simultaneously contributing to the conservation of fish and wildlife in
their own back yards," Noreen Walsh, an acting U.S. Fish and Wildlife
Service regional director, said in a news release.

The flycatcher summers in the valley,
establishing nests in the willows and smaller cottonwoods near wetlands and
slow-moving or standing bodies of water.

There’s a new book out that would make a great
gift this year. It’s called “What the Robin Knows.”

It’s about bird language.

While the chirping of birds may seem
inconsequential, this book is not your ordinary bird guide and is not just for
birders. Author Jon Young makes a strong case for what humans are missing by
ignoring or neglecting to give our attention to the vocalizations of birds.

In “What the Robin Knows,” Young describes five
basic types of vocalizations: songs, companion calls, territorial aggression,
adolescent begging and alarms. Anyone who has sat in a tree stand, walked a
trail or stood knee deep in a river has heard all of these at some time.

What you may have been missing, or may have
noticed but not been able to interpret, is that both the silences and the
sounds of birds are communicating information about the wider forest.

To teach about bird language, Young describes
the relationship between a zone of awareness and a zone of disturbance. The
goal of anyone wanting to learn bird language is to make your zone of awareness
larger and your zone of disturbance smaller.

For experienced woodsmen and trackers, this may
seem obvious, but the actual technique of walking with “invisibility” is not an
easy skill to obtain. Young learned the old-fashioned way — years outside with
the guidance of mentors.

A wildfire battled by fire crews at the Waituna
wetlands since Monday night is under control but several species of rare birds
are threatened by the damage.

It took five ground crews and three helicopters
to bring the fire, which burnt through 498 hectares of the
internationally-recognised wetlands, under control.

Several species of rarely sighted birds lived in
the 500 hectares of the Waituna Wetlands Scientific Reserve destroyed by fire,
with some of the birds nesting at the time of the blaze, experts say.

The rural fire authority's principal rural fire
officer Mike Grant said although the flames had died down, there was still a
lot of work needed to ensure the fire was completely out.

While weather conditions in Southland have been
wet with average rainfall recorded, scrubby vegetation dries quickly after rain
and can burn within two to three hours, even in cold conditions, he said.

''There will be crews out there today patrolling
the fire perimeter and dampening down hot spots to ensure the fire is fully
extinguished.''Fire investigators are continuing to examine the cause of the
fire.

"This fire is an opportunity for people to
think about what fire risks may be on their property. Although this fire
occurred in a wetland it could have occurred anywhere" Mr Grant said.

"Fine, dry scrubby vegetation can be found
around home gardens, farmsland, hedges and dry dead grasses at any time of the
year.''

The Awarua Wetlands, near Invercargill, is one
of the largest remaining wetlands and is recognised for its biological
diversity, cultural values and bird life.

Conservation Department Southern Islands area
manager Andy Roberts, who is also the Southern Rural Fire District's incident
controller, said bird species in the manuka bush and wetlands in the Awarua Bay
area included bitterns, fernbirds and crakes.

Tuesday, 27 November 2012

Conservation groups are warning that the UK
could lose several species of bird within a decade if, as expected, billions of
pounds of European funding to help farmers promote biodiversity are cut.

Under details being thrashed out as part of a
rebalancing of the Common Agricultural Policy budget, some £8bn for rural
development is likely to be lost, according to the RSPB. Billions more could
also go under new rules allowing EU member states to divert money to food
production away from schemes that protect fields and heritage sites. The RSPB
said the plans would spell disaster for wildlife in England and
the rest of Europe.

"It is outrageous news that President van
Rompuy is asking EU leaders to cut the largest single budget for wildlife
conservation in the UK," said Martin Harper, the RSPB's director of
conservation. "It would be a disaster. We've seen a proposal which could
have led to the pot of money for wildlife-friendly farming being cut by up to
one third. The loss of wildlife from our farmed countryside is a crisis which
to date no politician has faced up to. We need European leaders to recognise
that funding to tackle this must not be traded away when they next come
together to thrash out a deal. Our landscapes, farmers and wildlife depend on
the future of this funding."

Rural development cash is used to develop
agri-environment schemes that pay farmers to manage hedgerows and wildflower
flowers that provide vital food and shelter for birds. The cash funded England's
Higher Level Stewardship Scheme which has been credited with playing a major
part in protecting wildlife. Since the first agri-environment schemes were
introduced in 1987, tens of thousands of farmers and landowners have helped
wildlife, according to the RSPB.

SAN JOSE -- The holidays are hard on birds, at least those with plump, tasty bodies. But bird-kind can be hard on us too, and not just in Hitchcock films. For the jet-set, birds pose a deadly threat: Flying into an engine during takeoff or landing, they can send a plane into a fatal plunge. Airlines paint eyes on the engines because apparently birds find a 150,000-pound jetliner scarier if it's looking at them. But they don't always fall for that.

So in a move to make flying a little less fretful for people, San Jose leaders this week will allow airport staffers more ammo in their battle against the birds. For real. The proposed ordinance modification will let airport staffers and contracted biologists shoot at birds to clear them from the airfield.

OK, they plan to fire blanks mostly, just to scare them off. But they'll have permission to load birdshot if their feathered foes don't get the flock out.

"At some point," said Mineta San Jose International Airport spokeswoman Rosemary Barnes, "all those other measures aren't enough."

Actually, airport staffers have already done this. But current city law only lets cops and military types fire guns at the airport, so they want the City Council to approve the change.

"It kind of clears it up administratively so we're in compliance with the municipal code," said Airport Manager Curt Eikerman.

University of Delaware post-doctoral researcher
Ian Stewart is conducting research to answer this question a bit more
scientifically. His subjects – tree swallows – make human parents look like
slouches. Both the mother and father tree swallow feed their hatchlings every
five minutes, 12 hours a day. (It should be noted, though, that their
parenting gig is much shorter than ours—after 17 or 18 days the young leave the
nest.) Stewart is studying these small, migratory birds to better understand
the trade-offs they make between reproduction and immunity. His research could
potentially help scientists who study human biology better understand our own
immune system and its stressors. Stewart is part of a young but growing
interdisciplinary field called ecoimmunology, which combines aspects of
immunology with ecology, biology, physiology and evolution. He chose to focus
his research on tree swallows and bluebirds because both are fairly tolerant of
human interaction. "Some birds don't like being observed but tree swallows
and bluebirds don't get stressed from being watched or handled," notes
Stewart. There's another very important benefit to working with these
birds—since they nest in boxes, not up in the trees, they're a heck of lot
easier to catch. Throughout the breeding season, Stewart catches the
parent birds, injects them with a harmless antigen and releases them. Then, he
re-catches the same birds a few days later to take blood samples and assess
each bird's immune response to the antigens. "Some of the tree
swallows work harder at parenting," notes Stewart. "It may be because
the bird has four hatchlings to feed instead of just three. Other times, the
bird is simply more energetic at taking care of its hatchlings, regardless of
brood size."

TIANJIN - An endangered species of bird grabbed
headlines in Chinese media over the past week not because of its elegant
beauty, but because 20 died of poisoning in northern China.

Poachers poisoned the wild birds within a
wetland nature reserve in North China's Tianjin municipality. Their actions
left 20 Oriental white storks dead and 13 others sickened, triggering public
outcry for intensified protection of wild animals and harsher punishments for
those behind the deaths of the storks.

The birds, no more than 3,000 of which remain in
the wild worldwide, were stopping at the city's Beidagang Wetland Nature
Reserve along their migratory route from Northeast China to central Poyang
Lake.

Sources with the reserve management committee
have confirmed that the birds, as well as other species, were found poisoned on
November 11 after an amateur photographer spotted the dead body of a stork.

Since being treated in the center, the 13
poisoned birds have made complete recoveries and are ready to be released on
Wednesday morning, according to Dai Yuanming, director of the center.

Dai said the birds have been banded for further
tracking and research.

Police said the water in the wetland was
confirmed to have contained carbofuran, also known as furadan, one of the most toxic
carbamate pesticides.

Local authorities are diluting the tainted water
and looking for the sources of the pesticide. It is believed that the birds
were poisoned by poachers who sell the rare birds to restaurants where
wildfowls are sold illegally.

Though hunting and trading endangered animals
are both banned in China, a large bird like the Oriental white stock can fetch
about 200 yuan (about $32) on the black market, while a swan can garner up to
1,000 yuan.

Local authorities have since stepped up protection
measures at the reserve, and a 50,000 yuan reward has been offered for clues on
the whereabouts of the poachers.

The poisoning of the wild birds has triggered
angry outbursts directed at poachers, as well as outcry for intensified wild
animal protection.

"What a cruel and greedy slaughter! The
storks are just like travellers on their way home, but now they will never have
a chance to get back on their way," "xianyubujiaoao" wrote on
Sina Weibo, a popular Twitter-like microblogging platform.

"No trading, no poaching! The true
murderers behind wild animal poaching are those greedy gluttons who devour
almost everything," wrote Weibo user "linxiaohaidechuntian."

Xue Manzi, a famous Chinese angel investor and
an active Weibo user, also asked the public not to eat wildfowls or other wild
animals and urged authorities to intensify their crackdown on the illegal
industrial chain of poaching, including restaurants that sell endangered
animals.

After public outcry, a proposal to protect
threatened snowy plovers on Clam Beach by poisoning egg-gobbling predators was
withdrawn Tuesday by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

”That didn't seem to fly -- no pun intended --
with the public,” Fish and Wildlife Field Supervisor Nancy Finley said of the
plan to use an avicide called DRC-1339 to kill corvids -- crows and ravens --
that preyed on plover eggs.

Humboldt County's Clam Beach has one of the most
aggressive predation rates by corvids, according to a Fish and Wildlife press
release. In the last 11 years, more than 70 percent of snowy plover eggs on the
north coast have been lost due to corvid predation.

A series of methods put forward at the last
meeting included discouraging preying behavior, trapping corvids, and more
comprehensive approaches like reducing trash that attracts corvids to the
beach: “things to reduce the corvid population on a more holistic scale,”
Finley said.

She said the goal of Fish and Wildlife is
managing snowy plover protection with realistic methods. Labor intensive
options could be made possible with community volunteers.

”That's something I'd like to gauge as well,”
Finley said.

Third District Supervisor Mark Lovelace
expressed appreciation at the community meetings that led Fish and Wildlife to
drop its proposal.

”I'm really glad the Fish and Wildlife Service
has gone out to get some outreach in the community,” he said. “There's
widespread agreement that something needs to be done... but perhaps they need
to be involving the community in exploring a wider range of options.”

DELTON, MI -- The evening sky took on a surreal
quality not unlike a scene by Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa. A dull
gray ceiling had transformed in just a matter of minutes to an explosion of
orange, yellow and purple, flooding the lakefront with a post-apocalyptic
light.

To add even more drama, there were cranes flying
in. Small flocks hung in the sky over the lake, calling in their unmistakable
tongue, part trumpet, part purr, part rattle and croak, a language that has
fascinated man for centuries.

Standing nearby, bundled up to ward off cold,
Tom Funke was counting them on a clicker he held in his hand. A pair of
binoculars hung around his neck.

Funke is the director of conservation for
Michigan Audubon Society. He and I had come out for the annual state crane
count, an event that provides the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service with a
snapshot of migrating crane numbers. The data help them determine the status of
the cranes, which are protected under the federal migratory bird treaty
act.

Sandhills almost were extirpated in Michigan, having been sought by market
hunters for food and by clothiers for fashionable plumage. They were common in
Michigan until the 1880s. By 1905, they were nearly gone.

Monday, 26 November 2012

The long and short of a bird’s life may be
recorded in the tips of its chromosomes, a new study suggests.

A study of Seychelles warblers living on a small
island in the Indian Ocean suggests that the length of telomeres — bits of DNA
that cap chromosome ends — can predict a bird’s chance of dying better than its
chronological age can. Warblers with shorter telomeres were less likely to
survive another year, especially if the truncation happened rapidly, David S.
Richardson, a molecular ecologist at the University of East Anglia in Norwich,
England, and colleagues report online November 20 inMolecular Ecology.

The study “provides very important evidence that
backs up what has been found in the laboratory — changes in telomere length
matter a lot,” says animal ecologist Pat Monaghan of the University of Glasgow
in Scotland.

Increasing age and body mass were also linked to
shorter telomeres in the birds. That result stands in contrast to a recent
large study of people in northern California that found telomeres get shorter
with age, but that higher body mass is associated with longer telomeres (SN
Online, 11/11/12).

Like shoestring aglets, telomeres stop
chromosomes from unraveling or being eaten away at the ends. Cells with very
short telomeres become decrepit or die, but it has been unclear whether that
has any effect on whole body.

A big vehicle plowing through a flock of
startled starlings may have left 50 to 100 birds dying in the street over the
weekend.

That’s one theory the Missouri Department of
Conservation has come up with to explain the birds’ demise, according MDC Media
Specialist Francis Skalicky.

“A Conservation agent investigated the scene and
there’s no evidence of foul play,” Skalicky said late Monday. “He did collect
two birds and the Health Department was asked if they wanted to test them, but
they said no. We believe it was a single event at that location. It may be
unusual to see on a street within the city limits, but it’s not an uncommon
event in the wild for large numbers of starlings to die all at once.”

People began reporting the presence of a large
number of dead birds at the intersection of Fremont Avenue and Erie Street on
Saturday. Skalicky said starlings tend to form large flocks, especially in
cooler weather.

It’s possible a flock was feeding on the ground
in the area and flew into a large vehicle as it passed by, he said.

“It has happened in other places,” he said. “A
second theory is that there may have been an overnight roost disturbance, but
we don’t really know what caused them to die.

“It’s a head-scratcher.”

Because the incident happened in one small
location — and no other bird species appear to have been affected — Skalicky
said MDC isn’t planning any further inquiry into the bird deaths.

“We’re certain it was a single event, but we
don’t know for sure what that event was,” he said.

Shelmarie Main and Chloe Mallone were
heartbroken when they saw a blue-beaked American wigeon collapsed on a pond
drainage grate. His head hung down, barely keeping his beak out of the water,
and his wings were splayed to the side.

The mother-daughter duo take walks along Village
Pond Park most days to admire wildlife. On that day, two kids poking at
something on the ground caught their attention. As they got closer, they
realized it was a dying wigeon. His head was twisted and he barely moved. His
instinct to flee seemed gone. When they touched him, he shuddered with his last
breath. Just a foot away, a female mallard was struggling. Slightly more alert,
the bird tried to flee but could not.

Main and Mallone moved the dying animals to
safety. As they did, they discovered two more dead ducks. They called the
county's animal control for help.

"It was horrible, there were so many,"
said Mallone, 20, who said she's been a bird geek since age 9. "To see one
once in a while is normal but all of these at once, it was heartbreaking. At
first I thought someone had been poisoning them."

In the last two weeks nearly three dozen dead
and dying water fowl have been found in several areas across Orange County,
including Lake Forest and Santa Ana. More than a dozen were found at the
Village Pond in Lake Forest. At least 16 dead and dying ducks have been found
at Carl Thornton Park near South Coast Plaza in Santa Ana. Most have been
migratory birds such as the American wigeon, American coots and some mallards.